Tag: bass pro shops

NOTE: This is an incomplete piece and was never officially presented to Bass Pro Shops for consideration.

In 2014, while working on optimizing the CSS (a project that got postponed indefinitely) I started envisioning a product page redesign for Bass Pro Shops. The current product page was created in 2012 when the big site redesign happened, and while it was acceptable for that time and place, it wasn’t holding up well under evolving user needs. Since this wasn’t a requested project I had an open canvas for design, which was quite rare.

In 2014 I redesigned the Keep In Touch (social links/icons) landing page and the area in the footer on Bass Pro Shops. If you’ve been reading this series, you can probably spot a pattern; Bass Pro did a lot of redesigning in 2014 to bring many pages up to the newest site design standards.

In 2011, Bass Pro Shops had a cart that was called a “windowshade” which basically dropped down from the top of the screen, then pulled back up when you clicked close. From both a development standpoint and a user experience standpoint, this was a nightmare. No one really enjoyed this feature, but of course you can’t change a large website quickly so it took a few years to change things up. This feature was live from 2011 until 2013.

When I was hired as by Bass Pro Shops as a web developer in 2010, one of my first assignments (before the size guides redesign) was to redesign the store map or the store locator. This map showed current Bass Pro Shops stores around the United States and Canada with basic contact information and a link to their respective store pages with much more information, as well as showing the locations where future stores would be located. The old store map was dated and hadn’t been updated with the website redesign in 2009, and was an entirely manual process to update the map information every time something changed. The needs were deceptively simple: make the new map larger to fit our new website format (before responsive design kids!), update the design to match the new branding, and integrate it into our homegrown backend CMS for easier updating.

One of the first projects I was assigned when I started working at Bass Pro Shops was to redesign the size guides for apparel. The current guides were outdated and no longer included correct information. Originally, the business users wanted the ability to use our product management system to populate the information as well as host the information on the product page itself, but this was moved to phase 2 as upgrades to the backend had to be completed first. We decided that phase 1 would be the redesign and information update, while creating as much of a template for later integration into other systems as possible.

So back when I worked for Bass Pro Shops, I was tasked with redesigning the gift card page. The page design was incredibly outdated, and ultimately we wanted to make the landing page as informative and actionable as possible regardless of a user’s familiarity with the gift card process on basspro.com.